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We don't know yet who will emerge as winners from the turmoil in the Middle East. But it's pretty clear who is the biggest loser.

"The White House has not looked weaker and more indecisive in decades," said Sultan al Qassemi, a columnist for a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.

"Nobody's listening to America anymore," Rami Khouri, director of the Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut told the Washington Post. "It's become irrelevant."

The Obama administration was caught by surprise by developments in Egypt and has been struggling to catch up.

In a televised address last Tuesday (2/1), Mr. Mubarak said he wouldn't run for re-election when his term expires in September.

President Obama, in a televised address immediately following Mr. Mubarak's, did not criticize that timetable. But the next day White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Mr. Obama wants Mr. Mubarak gone "yesterday."

"Obama's peremptory command of dismissal to a ruler who has been America's staunch ally for 30 years was a geostrategic blunder on three levels," said Francis "Bing" West, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense. "First, it signaled American arrogance; the White House presumed to tell another country's ruler what to do. Second, it guaranteed that Mubarak and his government, for however long they endure, will be less cooperative with us. Third, it unsettled our non-democratic allies throughout the Middle East."

Then on Sunday (2/6), Mr. Obama's special envoy, Frank Wisner, said Mr. Mubarak's "continued leadership is critical" through a transition to a more democratic form of government. This prompted the State Department to disown the veteran diplomat.

Egyptian businessman Shafik Gabr agreed with Mr. Wisner. "If the transfer of power happens today, the mobs will rule," Mr. Gabr told Fox News. "It will be similar to the circumstances that brought Hamas to power in Gaza."

Hamas is the Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan), by far the best organized opposition group in Egypt. Aayan Hirsi Ali, who once supported the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote in the New York Times the Ikhwan will have the upper hand if elections are held too soon.

"In the short term at least, Egypt's politics are tilted against the more liberal and democratic elements in Egyptian society and in favor of the country's Islamists," agreed Georgetown University Prof. Daniel Byman.

The decline of Western influence is a product of bad leadership, wrote Ari Shavat in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

"How can it be that Bush's America understood the problem of repression in the Arab world, but Obama's America ignored it until last week?" he asked. "How can it be that in May, 2009, Hosni Mubarak was an esteemed president who Barack Obama respected, and in January 2011 Mubarak is a dictator whom even Obama is casting aside?"

"The Obama White House hasn't helped matters by shifting policy ground almost daily, causing confusion, and thereby squandering America's credibility and limited but precious influence," said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations who was an assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration.

The president views the crisis in Egypt as a "distraction" from his domestic agenda, a senior administration official told Michael Shear of the New York Times. He has "a delicate public relations challenge."

This may be why Mr. Obama is speaking so often when he has so little to say. His televised address right after Mr. Mubarak's was "an effort to claim credit," a former Middle East hand told Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post.

"(Obama advisers) know they muffed it and missed it and blew it -- so the empty remarks are an effort to establish a counter narrative," the Middle East expert said.

It would be better if the administration "would seem a little less frantic about getting into the news cycle," said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

"President Obama has got to learn the fundamental rule of dealing with careening crises," said Mr. Gelb. "State your basic principles and then shut up."

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